Life always seems to be interesting for Super Furry Animals. With their last album, 2001's Rings Around the World, the Welsh band commissioned a video for every song and hired Paul McCartney on celery- and carrot-chewing duties. The year before, they went to Bogota in Colombia to meet Andrew Oldham, the Stones' original manager and image-maker, where they were subject to the mercurial Oldham's whims.

"One day he took us to his son's school in the mountains," says Gruff Rhys, Super Furry Animals' lead singer, lyricist and ideas man. "And he made a detour to show us the rebel forces' camps. But we had to leave because everyone kept recognising his wife, Esther, who is the Colombian Bianca Jagger."

Now the band has completed Phantom Power, an album, also released as a DVD, which manages to combine British psychedelia, folk music and techno and somehow sound cohesive.

This collision of unlikely influences makes sense when you meet Rhys, a charmingly ebullient Welshman overflowing with enthusiasm for the many things he finds interesting. After picking us up from Cardiff station in his battered Vauxhall Corsa, which has a stereo system worth more than the car, he drives us back to his home while telling us about the poetry battles that have been raging for centuries in Welsh villages. "They're like the rapping contests that Eminem does in 8 Mile," says Griff. "The poems follow a mathematical formula called cynghanedd, and each village enters its own poet to represent it."

Rhys's Cardiff town house has a room full of records, books and instruments. There are piles of 45s, albums and CDs covering the floor in no apparent order, but from this chaos, Rhys manages to pull out some favourites. One recently purchased single is Fancy by Bobbie Gentry, the country rock singer from Mississippi who had a few hits in the 60s and 70s before disappearing into a self-imposed exile that has lasted to this day.

"We always buy loads of records when we go on tour, and then argue about who owns what as [the records] slip into peoples' suitcases," shouts Rhys over Gentry's rough but sophisticated vocal. "This is one I managed to hold on to from our last American tour. Bobbie Gentry is a fantastic singer who was a big star once but seems to have been forgotten. Maybe she wants it that way."

The first track on Phantom Power begins with a snippet of a song by Wendy and Bonnie, Californian sisters who were 13 and 17 when they made Genesis, a piece of sunshine pop recorded in 1969. "We've got very different tastes, but all the band members like the Beach Boys, Gene Clark, and things like this," says Rhys, digging out his copy of the album. "It has amazing songs, amazing lyrics and amazing voices."

From the same era comes Odessey and Oracle (sic), British beat band the Zombies' polite, melodic, well-crafted foray into psychedelia. "It's one of the best albums ever made," says Rhys. "The first album made in Abbey Road after the Beatles completed Sgt Pepper. I take it everywhere with me and I've got through about five or six copies of it, but it's sadly underrated. It's popular in the States but in this country, it's mostly forgotten. Its certainly been influential on us."

In between bringing us numerous trays of tea and Hobnobs, Rhys expounds on his enthusiasm for folk music, including Memories, an album by Richard and Mimi Farina. Richard Farina was an American civil-rights activist, poet and performer who wrote the college-set novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. On the night of its launch in 1966, he was killed in a motorbike accident. He recorded Memories with Mimi, Joan Baez's sister, the year before. "He was an Irish-Cuban who lived a fantasy lifestyle - he claimed that he had to flee Cuba amongst other things."

After playing some awful examples of Japanese dancehall music, which covers Jamaican hits and translates them into Japanese ("There's a massive dancehall scene in Osaka, and one of the best things about touring is discovering things like this"), Rhys unearths singles by Meic Stevens, a Welsh folk singer and one-time contemporary of Syd Barrett. "He made an album in England in 1968, but he didn't enjoy the experience of being in the music industry, so he came back to Wales and made about 20 albums in Welsh," says Rhys. "He's a real master of melody."

In 1996, Super Furry Animals recorded an album, Mwng, in Welsh, and Stevens helped give them the confidence to do it. "My parents mainly bought Welsh-language music, and he was one of the people I grew up listening to. In the 1960s and 70s he was selling 75,000 records to a population of half a million, so he was an important role model. We speak Welsh every day. I think in Welsh and then have to translate my thoughts into English. It's natural for us to make music in our own language."

In the course of the afternoon, Rhys presents a box set of Finnish birdsong he bought in a jazz shop in Helsinki, the terrible disco-synthesiser soundtrack to The Warriors, and albums by Christian rocker Larry Norman and Brazilian superstar Rita Lee. He would happily carry on discovering records in his own house until the early hours, but time is running out, so he ends on Stevens' rousing singalong Y Brawd Houdini. "Everybody in Wales loves this track. A world-class guy singing in Welsh. No wonder he's my hero."